The iceberg contains a record of all this; travels with a mythic quality, a retrograde journey out of an underworld. Yet a return does not lead to more splendid scenes, as a trip through the gorge of the Grand Canyon does, or to richer displays of life, as a voyage to the interior of the Amazon, or to more opulent civilizations, living or dead, as Egypt's Valley of the Kings, or even to greater knowledge, as the ultimately moral journeys of Odysseus, Dante, even Marlowe do. It leads only to more ice.